1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

His cumbersome mind clung to an obscure ideal, shared by many people of limited intellect and venerated with unthinking respect: to let a branch sprout from the main trunk, an extension of himself.

Las palabras son nocivas para el sentido secreto de las cosas.

But when we have offered love and reverence of our own accord, and not out of habit, when we have been disciples and friends with our innermost feelings, then it is a bitter and terrible moment when the realization is suddenly brought home to us that the guiding current of our life is bearing us away from those we love. Then the terrified heart flees anxiously back to the valleys of childhood virtues, and cannot believe that the rupture must take place, that another bond must be severed.

Siddhartha began to understand that it was not happiness and peace that had come to him with his son but, rather, sorrow and worry. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and worry of love to the happiness and peace he had known without the boy.

Believe me, there isn't an intonation in your voice, not a gesture, not a smile that I don't take seriously. But your thoughts I take less seriously. I take seriously all that I find essential and necessary in you. Why do you want particular attention paid to your thoughts, when you have so many other gifts?

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

Pronto me di cuenta de que estas enseñanzas podían ser un consuelo sólo para los que las aceptaran literalmente y que creyeran ser la verdad. Si fueran, como para mí, en parte bella literatura, parte símbolos intrincados; un intento de explicación mitológica del mundo, uno podría instruirse y apreciarlas, pero uno no aprendería la forma de vivir y sacar fuerza de ellas.